I helped a friend build his first MVP and realized that I had also glimpsed my own personal MVP.

May of 2013 I decided I wanted to try and make money by teaching people how to build web applications with Ruby on Rails. A friend of mine, the founder of @jogabo, connected me with a super sharp designer, @stewartmccoy. Stewart wanted me to help him get up to speed so that he could build a very simple app that would facilitate the process of finding substitute players for informal league soccer play around the bay area. As a designer who couldn't wire the code to make this app work, I loved the idea of getting him up to speed with just enough backend knowledge to make him dangerous. I also really liked his idea because it holds with a huge part of prototyping ideology that 37 Signals has codified in ReWork, aka, scratch your own itch.

The app lets people post soccer matches and facilitates very simple sms interactions to connect pickup players to teams that need extras. I love the app because 1. it works and 2. it demonstrates how very little resource can be applied to prototype an idea.

Stewart, you rock and thanks a lot for following through on what I taught you!

I am still avail as a tutor if you want to learn about rails, node, angular but mostly the process of rapid product prototyping. Find me on Twitter, @jcdavison